3 Comments.

I think you may find that the 'strong coffee / weak people' line has an earlier attribution to Mike Walton. Just google for it.

TiNSTaSC... is so metropolitan. Rest-of-country view on Stockholm: People there live on ambition and coffee.

One should also be aware of the common Swedish workplace tradition of coffee and coffee breaks. In most workplaces, there is a coffee brewer or two in the break room, in some there may even be a restaurant-scale one. Typically, coffee is brewed for the morning break, and the large pot may stand, warmed and rewarmed, the coffee getting more and more corrosive as the day goes on.

More enlightened workplaces may have coffee machines or brew on demand. Whichever is the case, coffee availability is on par with other necessities of life.

The much older tradition from the countryside and farm is the coffee pot with boiled coffee on the wood stove, again expected to heat and reheat until finished. Some old codgers like coffee with salt rather than sugar.

So when a typical Swede (Stockholmer) drinks coffee, it is very strong by most other nationalty standards.

A saying in Sweden has it: "Coffee should be black as the Devil, hot as Hell, and sweet as sin." (There's a similar saying in Turkey.) -- Bo Leuf